Wife of former Mexican official sentenced in Texas to 10 months in prison for fraud

Silvia Beatriz Pérez Ceballos, the wife of a former Mexican state official who last year became the first person in a string of Texas money laundering prosecutions to go to trial, was sentenced to 10 months in prison on a fraud charge Thursday, Jan. 11, 2018.

Silvia Beatriz Pérez Ceballos, the wife of a former Mexican state official who last year became the first person in a string of Texas money laundering prosecutions to go to trial, was sentenced to 10 months in

Silvia Beatriz Pérez Ceballos, the wife of a former Mexican state official who last year became the first person in a string of Texas money laundering prosecutions to go to trial, was sentenced to 10 months in prison on a fraud charge Thursday, Jan. 11, 2018.

Silvia Beatriz Pérez Ceballos, the wife of a former Mexican state official who last year became the first person in a string of Texas money laundering prosecutions to go to trial, was sentenced to 10 months in

Wife of former Mexican official sentenced in Texas to 10 months in prison for fraud

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A former Mexican state official’s wife, who last year became the first person in a string of Texas money laundering prosecutions to go to trial, has been sentenced to 10 months in prison on a fraud charge.

The sentence by a Corpus Christi judge is a mixed bag for the at least nine former Mexican officials and businessmen who face criminal charges as the result of federal investigations in Corpus Christi and San Antonio on allegations they laundered tens of millions of dollars of bribes and stolen money in Texas.

A jury in October acquitted Silvia Beatriz Pérez Ceballos, whose husband was the finance minister for the state of Tabasco from 2007 to 2012, on a money laundering charge, but found her guilty of bank fraud.

Pérez initially faced up to 6.5 years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, but U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzalez Ramos rejected prosecutors’ arguments that she take into account the money laundering and bribery allegations presented at trial, defense attorney Andino Reynal said.

The judge’s decision brought “absolute relief by the family, by Silvia, who’s spent eight months in jail already, and also a sense of vindication in the fact that the judge announced from the bench that she agreed with the jury’s verdict, that the money laundering and the foreign corruption hadn’t been proven, and she wasn’t going to give it any weight in the sentencing for this bank fraud,” Reynal said.

The Houston-based U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas wouldn’t comment Thursday.

At trial, prosecutors showed that Pérez and her husband, José Manuel Saíz Pineda, used a complicated network of trusts and companies to purchase real estate and luxury cars across the U.S., including in the Houston area.

One state contractor testified that he had given Saíz gifts, including more than $500,000 in 2008, but denied they were bribes. In order to convict Pérez of money laundering, prosecutors needed to prove that bribery happened in Mexico, that she was involved in financial transactions designed to hide the money’s criminal origins and that she knew the money was dirty. Jurors found that prosecutors hadn’t met their burden of proof on the money laundering charge, but did find her guilty of fraud for altering bank records.

Saíz is in jail in Mexico, where he faces corruption charges. Reynal said the prosecutions there are a form of political score settling by the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, which took control of the state in 2013. Saíz was appointed by former Gov. Andrés Granier Melo, a member of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party who’s been accused of corruption as well.

“I think that the new government in Tabasco over promised to the U.S. government,” Reynal said. “They promised a quality of proof that ultimately they were not able to deliver.”

A half-dozen businessmen and former officials from other Mexican states have pleaded guilty and avoided trial or turned over millions of dollars in property to avoid prosecution. As a result of those cases, the U.S. government has seized bank accounts in Texas and Bermuda and real estate in San Antonio, Austin, Kyle, Houston and the Rio Grande Valley. Pérez was the first to make prosecutors present evidence before a jury.

“This was in a lot of ways a test case for the government,” Reynal said. “This is the first person to have gone to trial on one of these foreign corruption type theories. I think it was a serious reversal and shows the pitfalls overzealous prosecutors can fall into when they fail to conduct their own sort of independent investigation on what happens in other countries.”

Andres Sanchez, a Houston lawyer who has represented Mexican businessmen and politicians facing criminal charges in the U.S., cautioned against reading too much into Pérez’s case.

“I think people who feel like they played a small role might be emboldened to go to trial, but that’s going to depend on each individual case,” Sanchez said. “Somebody played a role similar to what her husband’s accused of probably wouldn’t be expecting that same type of sentence.”

“This case kind of shows you how easy it is in some situations for the government to convict people,” he added. “They had a very sympathetic client that played a small role, and still she walked away with a conviction. It shows you how much power and how much strength the federal government has if they want to target someone even if they played a smaller role.”

Reynal acknowledged that his client, a child psychologist who took the stand in her own defense, cut a more sympathetic figure than a politician accused of taking bribes.

“Most of the other people who have been charged were all border governors, and I think based on what I’ve read in the press is that there’s many times allegations of connection to narcotics, and this has none of that,” he said. “This is a state far in the south of Mexico and there’s no allegations of narcotics or organized crime or anything like that.”

In October, the jury denied the government’s request to seize property Pérez and Saíz own in the U.S. On Monday, prosecutors filed a civil asset forfeiture lawsuit against a home they own in Sugar Land. Because it’s a civil proceeding, the government faces a lower burden of proof to take possession of the property.

“The family is studying its options, but plans on mounting a vigorous defense,” Reynal said.